Beacon Broadside: A Project of Beacon Presstag:typepad.com,2003:weblog-14005452016-06-22T13:50:24-04:00Ideas, opinions, and personal essays from respected writers, thinkers, and activists. A project of Beacon Press, an independent publisher of progressive ideas since 1854.TypePadAre Most Homophobes Repressed Homosexuals?tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00e54ed2b7aa883301bb0912306d970d2016-06-22T13:50:24-04:002016-06-22T17:09:36-04:00By Michael Bronski, Ann Pellegrini, and Michael Amico
“Oh, he is such a homophobe. He’s probably really gay. That explains it.” How often have you heard this? How often have you thought it? Ironically, appeals to common sense are usually made when logical explanations fail or when the explanation is just too confusing to make immediate sense. That is the case with this myth, and, perhaps, with the idea of homophobia itself. Society, culture, economics, power structures, family relationships, prejudices, religion, and so many other factors enter into the creation and maintenance of homophobia. Isolating any one factor, such as a person’s supposed sexuality, and singling it out as the chief cause overlook this complexity. More important, with this myth, it also risks de-politicizing homophobia by turning it into a matter of one individual’s warped psychology.Beacon Broadside

The Orlando, Florida shooting has—in the wake of an ongoing investigation and every changing narrative—produced a massive amount of opinions. Many of these are misinformed, naive, spurious, ill-intended, inflammatory, and second or third guesses. As the story continues to unfold and more information emerges, the facts seem to become even more confusing, and less conclusive of any one single, cohesive explanatory theory.

As the news emerged that Omar Mateen had been a regular at the nightclub Pulse, and had visited gay male dating apps, his intention for doing any of this is still unclear. Given his homophobic public statements, the best we can say now is that—aside from whatever actual political ideologies he held—he was obsessed, on some level, with homosexuality.

This has caused a wealth of commentators—on the left, right, and center—to conclude that he was a self-hating homosexual. In this swirling crucible of non-confirmed information, this “explanation” resonates with many people. The reality is that it simply plays into—and restates—an old myth: that all homophobes are really all repressed homosexuals.

“Oh, he is such a homophobe. He’s probably really gay. That explains it.” How often have you heard this? How often have you thought it? Ironically, appeals to common sense are usually made when logical explanations fail or when the explanation is just too confusing to make immediate sense. That is the case with this myth, and, perhaps, with the idea of homophobia itself. Society, culture, economics, power structures, family relationships, prejudices, religion, and so many other factors enter into the creation and maintenance of homophobia. Isolating any one factor, such as a person’s supposed sexuality, and singling it out as the chief cause overlook this complexity. More important, with this myth, it also risks de-politicizing homophobia by turning it into a matter of one individual’s warped psychology.

Furthermore, the word homophobia has become so broadly defined, and so broadly used, that it can refer to a staggeringly wide range of emotional states, from simple annoyance at the presence of homosexuals to murderous rage. There are enormous differences between these ends of the spectrum and everything in between. But one fact unites these emotional states: the wide application of homophobia to explain an entire gamut of negative reactions toward homosexuality is a direct result of the increasing visibility of social expressions of homosexuality.

The word “homophobia” is a recent invention. After the gay liberation movement began in the late 1960s, LGBT people and their allies needed some idea, and preferably one that matched their intuition, for how others could be so deeply repelled, and in so many different ways, by the increasing visibility of homosexuality. Psychologist George Weinberg coined “homophobia” in the late 1960s, and it was used intermittently by other writers until Weinberg popularized it in his 1972 book, Society and the Healthy Homosexual. Weinberg defined “homophobia” as the revulsion to, or fear of being in close contact with, a lesbian or gay man. Since that time it has become common usage—as well as generating similar terms such as biphobia and transphobia—and has decisively shaped the public discussion of how we think about emotions and actions that manifest animus against lesbians and gay men. Although “homophobia” may be a useful word in some instances, it is often immensely misleading in describing the hows and whys of people’s feelings and actions. Nonetheless, many people made the connection that a fear of proximity to homosexuality somehow implicated a person in homosexuality.

This connection often feels intuitive. We have all experienced a situation when people hide something about which they feel ashamed, guilty, or nervous. They may begin to act defensively, or attempt to shift the blame, or shame, onto someone else. This is true of a five-year-old who is caught stealing a cookie from the kitchen after she should be in bed. Or of a co-worker who has not completed his assigned project on time and begins pointing fingers to shift the blame. It is easy to see how this reflexive emotional response might allow many people to think that when a person acts out or articulates a vivid homophobic response to a situation—say, reacting to the public presence of obviously gay men on a street by exclaiming loudly, “When did all the fags move into this neighborhood?”—that person might be hiding something about his own sexual desires. But maybe not. It is important to remember that the myth that most homophobes are repressed homosexuals is very often a story to explain and negate straight-male aggression against gay men.

Homophobia, according to Weinberg, is a symptom of deeper prejudice that gains its meaning and power from the ways individuals fear people different from themselves. Weinberg locates the roots of homophobia in specific moral and political views about the world, including religious beliefs that homosexual acts are sinful and the idea that nonheterosexual behavior is a threat to traditional values. Racism is similarly influenced and constructed by a long, complicated history in the United States and is entwined with legal, social, and economic issues. Although Weinberg wrote that the fear of “being homosexual” was about much more than homosexuality per se, the connection between the fear of gay people and the fear of being gay yourself rang so true to readers that it became the main idea people took away from the book. And it quickly became ingrained in both LGBT and mainstream culture.

But Weinberg did not claim that the people who feared homosexuals most—and, again, he was writing almost entirely about men fearing other men—were repressed homosexuals. Human beings are capable of a wide range of erotic feelings. Heterosexuals can feel conflicted about their same-sex attractions, but so can people primarily attracted to the same sex. None of these internal conflicts would be extraordinary, since our culture—even now, which is far more accepting than in the past—does not encourage individuals to understand, and be comfortable with, their sexual desires. We are taught not to explore or express them. In his 1948 study Sexual Behaviorin the Human Male, Alfred Kinsey and his team of researchers wrote, “The anatomy and functional capacities of male genitalia interest the younger boy to a degree that is not appreciated by older males who have become heterosexually conditioned and who are continuously on the defensive against reactions which might be interpreted as homosexual.” Weinberg noted a similar defense. Whether predominantly heterosexual or homosexual, people who are not comfortable with their same-sex attractions may try to negate these desires through what Weinberg calls “chronic self-denial.” He also argued that people with deep unhappiness about this conflict may experience a “flight into guilt.” Both of these results might be described as “repressing” same-sex erotic attractions because they make these people feel uncomfortable, nervous, and even panicked when confronted with homosexual people of the same sex as themselves.

These psychological responses reflect some of the social and political realities with which we all live. Repression is not simply an internal process. Repression is a response to an entire social world. Homosexuality comes to have meaning, whether pleasant or uncomfortable, only because it is viewed and understood through that world. A person cannot repress “homosexuality” as such because it is not an entity with clear boundaries. It would be absurd to argue that all white racists secretly think they are black or want to be black. The “repression of homosexuality” is the repression of a whole string of associated ideas that for one person may connect to same-sex attraction. Another person may have different associations. We all repress, to some degree, aspects of our erotic desires, sometimes because they are culturally frowned upon, but also because they can be associated with feelings that make us uncomfortable. When something in this repressed chain is drudged up by a reminder of it in daily life, we need to get rid of the discomfort it causes. This is why it makes sense to people that acts of violent homophobia are due to the repression of homosexual tendencies.

Another persuasive aspect of this myth is that it reinforces the widespread cultural fantasy that heterosexual men are unfazed by the possibility of same-sex desire. In this fantasy “real” straight men are so secure in their heterosexuality that they would never need to act out against gay people and, especially, gay men. It is insecure straight men, and closeted gay men, who are the problem. Heterosexual men thus have no connection to, or blame for, homophobic violence.

Rather than homophobes repressing their homosexual feelings, it is more likely that they are avoiding the idea of homosexuality. In his 1946 foundational study of prejudice, Anti-Semiteand Jew, Jean-Paul Sartre, writing just after the Holocaust, boldly argues that anti-Semitism has less to do with Jews than with the fragile psyche and identity of the anti-Semite.

The anti-Semite has essentially created a fantastical idea of the Jew (which has nothing to do with actual people or culture) that “explains” everything that is wrong with both the society in which the anti-Semite lives as well as his own life. In the anti-Semite’s fervid imagination, the mythical Jew has too much social power, controls the banks and national wealth, and controls cultural institutions such as universities. In its most extreme version, the anti-Semite imagines that “the Jew” conspires against Christians, molesting and murdering Christian children. This fantasy Jew, which Sartre called “the idea of the Jew,” becomes the scapegoat for all that is wrong with the world. Sartre further argues that anti-Semitism is not an “opinion,” that is, a view based upon facts, but a “passion,” which is deeply believed despite all facts to the contrary. When the anti-Semite is even fleetingly reminded of this “Jew,” he feels entitled to react, sometimes violently, with a strongly felt anti-Semitism, telling himself that he is only defending himself and his culture, not attacking another person or group.

Sartre’s ideas strike home today. Homophobic passion, impervious to facts, is spouted by many evangelical Christians. Does this mean that televangelists such as Pat Robertson or the late Jerry Falwell, whose pronouncements about homosexuality are extreme and do great damage, are closeted homosexuals? Their homophobic diatribes can be so sexually explicit a listener might think these men were intimately familiar with homosexuality. It is tempting to say that this familiarity indicates that they are secretly gay. But it makes more sense to say that their relationship to homosexuality is complicated, and like Sartre’s anti-Semite, makes sense of their world. Robertson has used homosexuality to explain earthquakes and Hurricane Katrina. This is completely illogical, but passion is not logical. It is possible that homophobes may be envious of the pleasure they deny themselves. This pleasure is then projected onto the sinful homosexual. A recurrent theme in most antigay jeremiads is that gay men are wildly promiscuous and engage in outré sexual acts. Here the idea of the homosexual, not actual homosexuals, represents forbidden pleasures. Just as Jews historically are associated with money, homosexuals have become associated with sex. Wild, out-of-control sex becomes the very meaning of homosexuality. In a culture that does not deal honestly with pleasure, and in which sex is sometimes depicted as a biological force that leads to social anarchy if not properly controlled, the fantasy of the sex-crazed homosexual can generate intense social and personal antagonism.

Recent scientific studies have attempted to prove the connection between homophobic attitudes and repressed homosexuality. One study, “Is Homophobia Associated with Homosexual Arousal?” (1996), assessed the level of homophobia in white, heterosexually identified, male college students through questionnaires, and then tested whether they were aroused by gay porn by attaching a plethysmograph to measure the engorgement of their penis. The men who had been identified as homophobic were twice as likely to have a penile response to the gay porn, yet were also either unaware of their physiological response or denied it. Media reports trumpeted the study as proving that repressed same-sex attraction caused homophobia. But this was a serious misreading. The study did not prove that these “homophobic” males were secretly turned on by male homosexuality. Or that they were homosexual themselves. All this study demonstrated was that their homosexual arousal could occur as a result of the very anxiety around its possibility. Whether they were already attracted to the same sex is a different question.

A 2012 series of studies of 164 students from the United States and Germany also identified homophobia through a series of questions. But these studies used answers to additional questions, rather than physiological changes, to assess arousal in response to both sexual and nonsexual images. The studies concluded that “homophobia is more pronounced in individuals with an unacknowledged attraction to the same sex and who grew up with authoritarian parents who forbade such desires.” What the series actually demonstrates, however, is that homophobic responses are never just psychological or personal, but also always cultural, social, and maybe political.

These homophobia studies received a huge amount of media attention when they were published. The press release for the second string of studies claimed that it

sheds light on high profile cases in which anti-gay public figures are caught engaging in same-sex sexual acts [including that of] Ted Haggard, the evangelical preacher who opposed gay marriage but was exposed in a gay sex scandal in 2006, and Glenn Murphy, Jr., former chairman of the Young Republican National Federation and vocal opponent of gay marriage, who was accused of sexually assaulting a 22-year-old man in 2007.

Such extrapolations are absurd. No one explanation of homophobia, whether it is a political position or a scientific measurement, can be fully accurate if it denies its connections to the many other frames through which we see the world.

Whatever the complications of each individual psyche, we all live in a world that influences us every day in myriad ways. Homophobia, in all of its forms, expresses real social anxieties over how something will fit in or disrupt the world “as it is.” But that world is seen differently by every individual in it. That’s its trouble and its promise.

“Born This Way” or “Choice”?: Understanding the Development of Sexual Identitytag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00e54ed2b7aa883301bb090508d5970d2016-05-24T16:18:24-04:002019-06-04T12:30:49-04:00By Michael Bronski, Ann Pellegrini, and Michael Amico | Attempts to explain what causes homosexuality have a long, and often ugly, history. Various medical theories that pathologized homosexuality have caused and justified outright violence against LGB people, most notably, the use of electroshock treatments as part of therapeutic attempts to cure homosexuality in the 1950s. As terrible as this history is, it does not mean that attempts to consider what causes homosexuality—or how it evolves—are necessarily bad or dangerous for LGB people.Beacon Broadside

Kristen Stewart speaking at the 2012 San Diego Comic-Con International in San Diego, California. Photo credit: Gage Skidmore.

As the social landscape of sexual identities evolves, younger people such as actress Kristen Stewart are viewing love without labels. Star of Olivier Assayas’s film Personal Shopper, which won the Best Director Award at the Cannes Film Festival last weekend, Stewart told Variety in an interview, “There’s acceptance that’s become really rampant and cool. You don’t have to immediately know how to define yourself.” As of March, she has been in a relationship with French actress and musician Soko, and does not feel rushed to define her sexuality. Her embrace of sexual fluidity challenges the notion that “homosexuals are born that way,” one of many myths addressed in “You Can Tell Just By Looking”: And 20 Other Myths about LGBT Life and People by Michael Bronski, Ann Pellegrini, and Michael Amico. In this passage, the authors discuss how restrictive this viewpoint can be for heterosexuals and the LGBT community, and how important it is to view sexuality as an ongoing process that forms the basis of character and personality.

***

Attempts to explain what causes homosexuality have a long, and often ugly, history. Various medical theories that pathologized homosexuality have caused and justified outright violence against LGB people, most notably, the use of electroshock treatments as part of therapeutic attempts to cure homosexuality in the 1950s. As terrible as this history is, it does not mean that attempts to consider what causes homosexuality—or how it evolves—are necessarily bad or dangerous for LGB people.

The nineteenth-century invention of the homosexual and the heterosexual as distinct kinds of persons was followed almost immediately by various scientific attempts to explain why some women and men desire their own sex. Karl Heinrich Ulrichs was an influential early thinker who argued that the male homosexual had the body of a man and the soul of a woman, and that the reverse was true for a lesbian. This scientific explanation seems naive and misguided to us today, but it was an important step in giving people a way to think about the origins of their sexual desires.

A growing body of contemporary scientific research suggests that sexual desire—both gay and straight—may be related to brain structure. The most widely publicized such study is Simon LeVay’s 1991 study of “the hypothalamus, which controls the release of sex hormones from the pituitary gland.” His study claimed the hypothalamus “in gay men differs from the hypothalamus in straight men. The third interstitial nucleus of the anterior hypothalamus (INAH3) was found to be more than twice as large in heterosexual men as in homosexual men.” LeVay’s research garnered front-page coverage in the New York Times. The ensuing criticisms of LeVay’s study—many by other scientists—received far less attention.

Along with his survey sample being too small for an accurate study, his basic assumption that male/female brain differences are comparable to gay/straight differences—assumptions oddly similar to Ulrich’s—made little sense. Additionally, he never took into consideration the lived sexuality and experiences of his subjects.

Other brain research has been examining how “exposure to sex hormones in the womb during a critical period in brain development affects future sexual orientation.” These studies also suffer from a confused set of assumptions. Historian of science Rebecca Jordan-Young notes that, “Sexuality is notoriously hard to define. So when a headline proclaims, ‘Prenatal Environment May Dictate Sexual Orientation,’ just what is it, exactly, that it is said to have dictated? Is it whom someone desires? Whom one has sex with? What a person calls him or herself?” The rigid models and language used by these studies male/female and heterosexual/homosexual—cannot capture the multidimensional character of sexuality.

Genetic studies of sexual desire appear at first less problematic. Scientists have hypothesized that homosexuality runs in families. Studies done on twins seem to support this, finding that the identical twin of a lesbian has almost a 50 percent likelihood of being lesbian herself. A similar correlation—or concordance rate—was observed in cases of gay men with an identical twin brother. Concordance rates were lower, but still significant, in cases of fraternal twins and nontwin siblings. Identical twins share 100 percent of their genetic material, fraternal and nontwin siblings, approximately 50 percent. These differing rates are consistent with the idea that there is some genetic component to homosexuality.

Although these studies demonstrate that there may be a genetic basis to homosexuality, none of the studies has explained how this works. Genetic studies give us a picture of associations, but not the direct genetic mechanism by which genetic inheritance could “cause” homosexuality.

For much of the twentieth century, the most influential scientific theories concerning homosexuality came from psychiatry and psychology. These theories, importantly, introduced the idea that individuals play some role in the formation of their sexuality, even as they are always doing so in relation to others and to a larger culture.

Sigmund Freud, the founding father of psychoanalysis, thought that homosexuality was a normal variation of human sexual desire. He also thought that all people experienced, at least unconsciously, desire for the same sex at some point in their lives. Nonetheless, he believed that sexual development should end in reproductive heterosexuality, and in some of his writings portrayed homosexuality as a detour from that end point, an arrested development. But he also consistently argued that the path to reproductive heterosexuality was so difficult for anyone that it could not happen without compromise. In order to achieve mature reproductive heterosexuality, individuals have to restrict—give up—the much wider range of ways their desires might be experienced and expressed. Desires are shaped by cultural norms but not fully determined or “caused” by them. This insight is one of the reasons why Freud spent much more of his work explaining how people become “heterosexual.”

One of the most influential proponents of the pathology theory was psychiatrist Irving Bieber, who argued, in 1962, that “heterosexuality is the biologic norm and . . . unless interfered with all individuals are heterosexual.” Bieber identified the “causes” of homosexuality as negligent parenting, or other dangerous environmental factors such as society’s glamorization of homosexuality. Another prominent psychiatrist, Fredric Wertham, argued in his 1954 Seduction of the Innocent that Batman and Robin were coded homosexual lovers and Wonder Woman was a man-hating lesbian. (Wertham also testified at a congressional hearing that comic books corrupted young people and led to juvenile delinquency.) While images of LGB people in the media do shape people’s imaginations of what is possible to express about themselves, they do not do so in this simplistic way.

New research, such as Evelyn Hooker’s important 1957 study showing that homosexuals were no more likely to suffer from psychopathologies than heterosexuals, changed the mind of medical professionals. Society’s views were also changing during this time. Most important, the gay liberation movement—and other activists speaking the truth about their own lives demanded change. In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association reversed its decades-long stance and dropped its categorization of homosexuality per se as a disorder from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Irving Bieber and other conservative psychiatrists fought against this change and, for the next decades, also spoke out against the gay rights movement. But it is now the overwhelming consensus of “the behavioral and social sciences and the health and mental health professions” that homosexuality is, to quote the American Psychological Association, “a normal and positive variation of human sexual orientation.”

So, if there is no proof that homosexuals are biologically born that way, or that they are made that way through unhealthy parenting or bad cultural influences, then maybe individual agency is the real question, and people do just choose to be gay or lesbian.

The question of “born that way” versus “choice” is much more complex than either the political debates or scientific studies generally admit. The problem is that to many people, the word “cause”—like “choice” and “born that way”—marks a kind of big bang theory of sexuality that explains everything about who we are and how our sexual desire works.

It is more useful to think about cause as the more expansive question of how a person comes to have a character, or a personality. Sexuality is not a containable part of yourself, or simply reducible to a sex act. Rather, it is an ongoing process formed by the interactions of our psyche, body, and environment. Both we, as individuals, and the world around us are implicated. Sexuality, like personality, is a product of a string of minute choices—wanted, forced, compromised—that we consciously and unconsciously make during our endless negotiations of the world into which we are born. We can never know the precise moment when a person becomes gay. Nor can we know exactly how or why it happens. The same can be said about when, how, or why a person becomes straight.

Every day we make decisions, both direct and indirect, that lead to consequences we may never intend—but which we may come to understand and experience as profoundly desirable. For example, a young woman who attends a women’s college may encounter a vibrant community of lesbian, bi, and queer women. Perhaps this opens up possibilities for her own desire she did not know she had—possibilities she might not have discovered, or admitted, had she chosen a co-ed school. Her choices affected the path of her desire and self-identification; but, so did the countless other turns she took from the moment she was born, turns that also inevitably involved her in the lives of others. (In this instance, these turns include getting into, and affording, a private college.)

To ask what causes homosexuality is to try to understand how we, as humans, learn to grapple with a world of ultimately unanswerable mysteries—including the mystery of our own desire. This mystery entangles us in other vital questions: how our feelings and relationships come to have the meanings they do. How community results from these actions. And how we come to survive and live productively within it all.

What a momentous day! America couldn't be more proud to have the Supreme Court legalize gay marriage nationwide. This year's Pride celebrations will reach fever pitch with our country's step towards "making our union a little more perfect," as President Obama said in his address. The fight for LGBT rights has been a long and arduous one—and it isn't over yet. For Pride month, we have a short list of recommended readings to sink your eyes into, a list that outlines some of the complex issues at large in the LGBT community throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We thank Ann Pellegrini for suggesting this eclectic mix of classics and brand-spanking new titles.

Before it was published in 1956, Baldwin’s publisher told him to “burn” the novel. Its theme of homosexuality would purportedly alienate him from his black readers. We’re thankful that Baldwin did not heed these words. The story of an American expatriate whose life changes dramatically after he begins an affair with an Italian bartender speaks to the broader issues of social alienation—Baldwin had recently emigrated to Europe—as well as homosexuality and bisexuality.

Lorde’s collection of fifteen essays and speeches takes on racism, sexism, ageism, homophobia, and class disparity from her unique black lesbian feminist perspective. In her unflinching, lyrical, and trenchant prose, Lorde proposes social difference as the mechanism for action and change. Her messages of struggle and hope are still relevant more than twenty years after they were first published.

Sedgwick argues that our standard gender binary, limiting sexuality to homosexuality and heterosexuality, limits freedom and understanding. It is also just too simplistic. Focusing largely on language’s impact on sexuality, her book propounds queer sexuality, the “third sex”, to attack the binary system set up by society. This is one of the inaugurating texts in what is now LGBT studies. Especially wonderful is her introductory chapter “Axiomatic,” where she provides a deceptively simple list of axioms for thinking about sex and sexuality, beginning with Axiom 1: “People are different from each other.”

Hot off the presses, Petro’s book is the first to chart the history of religion and the AIDS crisis in the United States. He draws from a broad gamut of religious people, not just the religious right, to reveal the origins of the rhetoric, both secular and religious, that fuels the debates over public health, birth control, and gay marriage.

Can straight white men be just as sexually fluid as straight white women? Ward explores the social spaces—fraternity and military hazing rituals, online personals ads—where heterosexual man-on-man action isn’t indicative of going gay, but rather it reasserts their racial and gender identity. Indeed, as time goes on, notions of heterosexuality become increasingly complex. This hotter than hot book will be published on July 10.

Pride Month MythBusting: There's No Such Thing as a Gay or Trans Childtag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00e54ed2b7aa883301bb08483757970d2015-06-25T16:47:37-04:002015-06-25T16:47:37-04:00A true mark of today’s paradigm shift is seeing how quickly the media and American society at large learned to address Caitlyn Jenner and Laverne Cox by their new gender identities. The widespread visibility of diverse LGBT identities continues to...Beacon Broadside

A true mark of today’s paradigm shift is seeing how quickly the media and American society at large learned to address Caitlyn Jenner and Laverne Cox by their new gender identities. The widespread visibility of diverse LGBT identities continues to expand. This is the kind of progress that’s important to see, especially for children who are gay, trans, or nonconforming to binary gender.

Over the past two decades, more and more young people have been declaring, and at younger and younger ages, that they are gay or trans. But these gay and trans youth are consistently told that their feelings are not real and will just go away. Some parents fear that if mainstream culture accepts same-sex desire and gender noncomformity as normal, healthy, and positive, their children may be encouraged to engage in it. They are correct. Different models of sexual behavior and gender, especially the widespread visibility of LGBT identities, do offer new ways for people of all ages to behave and identify themselves. The increase in children actively identifying as trans is a direct result of the greater cultural visibility of transgender adults since the mid-1990s.

This is more than a question of identity, and adults know it. Think about all the work parents and educators put into teaching children how to be proper young men and women and shielding them from sexually explicit material. This considerable labor reveals the fear that underlies the myth that there are no gay and trans children: a child, especially your own, might somehow become gay or trans. Given this cultural tension, it is no surprising that when young people assert that they are gay or trans, many adults become very nervous and upset. Clearly, these young people not only know too much about sex and gender, but they know far too much about the wrong forms of sex and gender—and are willing to say so publicly.

The best way to silence to voices of children and ensure they grow up the "right way" is to create a special social category around them that adults control. This may sound odd to us now, but it is exactly what has happened. In the not-so-distant past, adults created this category. It is called childhood. Conceiving of childhood as a separate phase of life is a distinctly modern way of defining an individual by age. In his 1962 landmark book Centuries of Childhood, Philippe Ariès dates the invention of the child to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

To suggest that childhood is an invention does not mean that young people did not previously exist. During earlier historical periods, Western society thought differently about what young people were capable of doing, how they were held responsible, with whom they could socialize, and what games were age appropriate. Before modern childhood was invented, young people were treated more as miniature adults who were considered capable of making adult decisions (and held responsible for doing so) and were not shielded from the realities of sexual activity and reproduction. Over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the idea of "childhood innocence"—that is, children being innocent of adult experience and sexual knowledge—came into being and solidified as a fact in the nineteenth century.

By the twentieth century, psychologist G. Stanley Hall had invented the concept of adolescence, understood as a later stage of childhood even though adolescents looked and acted more like adults. Adolescence effectively extended the time given young people to develop the self-control necessary to meet the coming demands of adulthood. (If they still didn't conform, they could be put into yet another category: juvenile delinquent, which frequently included adolescents who were homosexual or gender deviant.) Ironically, this process often infantilized children and adolescents, making them less mature and less autonomous. They frequently became worrisome and needed to be controlled, apparently for their own good. This battle to regulate children and adolescents continues today, particularly in regard to gender and sexuality (see myth 8, "LGBT Parents Are Bad for Children").

In past years, prior to the emergence of young people identifying as trans, most children who manifested some form of gender nonconformity were presumed to be at risk of growing up gay. This was especially so for boys, whose range of proper gender behavior is more constricting than girls'. Tomboys are often culturally valorized; the sissy is never a hero. Beginning in 1980, both could be diagnosed with gender identity disorder in childhood (see myth 6, "Transgender People are Mentally Ill").

Many adults consider puberty the beginning of an individual's sexuality. Puberty is the name for the broad and varying period of time, roughly between the ages of ten and seventeen for girls and twelve and eighteen for boys, when bodies change and secondary sex characteristics—such as body hair and breasts—emerge. At this age, most boys and girls become capable of sexual reproduction. The popular imagination equates reproductive ability with sexuality—so children being sexual before puberty can't even be a question. Then why, as a culture, are we simultaneously suggesting otherwise? We scold sexually curious children and create cultural panics about sexting and adolescents having sex at younger and younger ages. Despite what many parents and other adults would like to believe, sexuality exists from birth to puberty, and its presence enormously shapes our sexual identities as adults.

What does sexuality look like in children before puberty? One of the first, and most groundbreaking, assertions that children are sexual beings was made by Sigmund Freud. In his 1905 Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Freud claimed that, contrary to the popular ideals of the innocent, unknowing child, children were deeply curious about sex, explored their bodies, played with their genitals, had sexual fantasies, and could experience sexual pleasure.

Children made sense of these evolving desires and experiences of bodily pleasure in a variety of ways. They often know them only to be pleasurable, and see nothing wrong with them. Adults often have a more conflicted mix of feelings about sexuality, gender, and their bodies. They may experience pleasure and joy from sex, but they may also feel guilt, anxiety, and shame. They may feel a mixture of all these things at any given time. Unfortunately, these adult confusions and ambivalences are often communicated to children. If adults see a child touching herself, do they communicate to her that it is wrong, shameful, or sinful? Or do they communicate some version of, "Honey, it's wonderful to explore your body, but it's also a private thing, so be sure to do that when you are alone"? These two parental responses may create vastly different experiences of sexual desire and psychological self-confidence in children.

Parental authority over children is one of the most important reasons why society denies that children can be gay or trans. Many parents want to raise their children to emulate their own values, social ideas, and ways of viewing the world. With gay and trans issues in social media, television, advertising, and even political coverage, parents may feel the need to exert even more control over their children. We can see this in campaigns to protect children from homosexuality, usually promoted by conservative religious groups such as Focus on the Family. Many parents insist that heterosexuality is the only acceptable route to happiness. They never seriously consider the needs, and desires, of the child. This only protects, and secures, the existing social order for the comfort of adults.

Parental control of gay and trans children happens on a large-scale, organized level. In the early 2000s, the conservative Christian ex-gay movement began targeting younger and younger teenagers to stifle their supposedly unwanted same-sex desires. They are now creating ministries and reparative-therapy groups to help transgender people transition "back." In 2005, fifteen-year-old Zach Stark became a cause célèbre after his parents, upon learning he was gay, forced him to attend an ex-gay camp, Love in Action (now called Restoration Path), against his will. His parents told him he was gay because they had "messed up." Ex-gay camp was supposed to help clear things up. Stark blogged on his MySpace page about his experiences, and his story went viral, garnering great sympathy for him and exposing the enormous injustice of the situation. Stark started at the camp—and even enjoyed some of the other young women and men there—but eventually left and happily claimed his gay male identity.

This gross abuse of parental authority is not restricted to conservative Christians. Many nonreligious send their children to therapy to help them "get over" their same-sex attractions. (Some parents, to their credit, offer their children support, even using gay-friendly therapists to make sure that they have additional emotional help in the face of potential bullying.)

Parents' panic over a gay or trans child is really a panic that they produced the wrong kind of child. Parents might also be ashamed at what their neighbors and friends would say or think if they knew their child was gay or trans. Acknowledging a gay or trans child may be difficult for parents, especially if they live in a socially or religiously conservative community. But there is no doubt that all of this is much more difficult on the child. Denying children their sexual or gender identities, indeed their human right to be gay or trans, is not guidance, oversight, education, or instruction. It is abuse. All children have a difficult time growing up. They have little power, little agency, little freedom, no ability to be independent, and are almost entirely at the mercy of their parents. Beyond the intense expectations and anxieties of the adults around them, children are also routinely subject to their own fears, hopes, and fantasies. But no one asks straight children "when they knew" they were straight.

The question here is not if children understand their sexuality or gender at a young age. It is how they understand it. How we name people, experiences, feelings, actions, and mental states matters a lot. This has been true of the classification "childhood." It matters because it shapes people's lives in many concrete ways. It matters because it helps organize how people think about a topic. It matters because it affects how the world views the issue. Even when the names we use are inaccurate, they do name something and can give people the cultural space to talk about their lives.

Sociologist Tey Meadow has found that both trans children and, especially, those parents supportive of their trans kids have become highly adept at using and remixing the ideas of medicine, psychology, religion, and secular spirituality. They use this remix to explain who their children are and why they need and deserve support and care of medical professionals, schools, and churches.

No labels can adequately describe the overwhelming variety of sexual expression or gender play in children. How much room do we, as a society, give children to imagine and experiment with all the possible ways they could be in the world and still be—still become—themselves? Young children's play-acting is a form of socialization, as they imagine themselves into the adult roles they will eventually be asked to assume. But this play-acting also has endless, unimagined possibilities. Children may play-act being cowboys or Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders. They may also play doctor with one another or interact with their beloved pets in the pretend role of veterinarian, or as if they, too, are a collie or a kitten. All children play and experiment with gender and sexuality in various ways that defy expectations and categories.

The phrase "feeling different" has become an acceptable way to describe the nonconforming child to a heterosexual mainstream culture because it does not explicitly name same-sex desire and behavior. Perhaps people are also comfortable with this phrase because at some point in our lives, every one of us feels different. Watch children play with a doll or stuffed toy, and you can quickly see how ready they are to bend the social rules they are simultaneously learning. What adults may interpret and judge as rebelliousness or immaturity, children may experience as a queer kind of freedom, a divergence from the straight-and-narrow. It may even be that there is no such thing as a straight child after all—if we understand straight not to mean "heterosexual," but regimented and normalized to become heterosexual. Gay and trans may thus describe all children's inventiveness, resilience, and agency, as well as their need for unconditional support from the adults in their lives so that all of these vital potentials can bloom.

Will Amending Pennsylvania’s Hate Crime Law Actually Prevent Gay Bashing?tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00e54ed2b7aa883301b7c6ea9acd970b2014-09-30T18:00:00-04:002014-09-30T18:00:00-04:00Do hate crime laws prevent gay bashing? Ann Pellegrini, co-author of “You Can Tell Just By Looking” and 20 Other Myths About LGBT Life and People, has a surprising answer.Beacon Broadside

On September 11, 2014, around 11pm, a gay male couple walking home through Philadelphia’s fashionable Center City was accosted and badly beaten by a group of 12 well-dressed white 20-somethings, both men and women, who shouted anti-gay epithets before and during the attack. Both victims ended up in the hospital, one of them beaten so badly he suffered broken bones in his face and had to have his jaw wired shut. The case has attracted a lot of attention both because the alleged perpetrators were so clean-cut and apparently well-to-do and included women and men—not the stereotype of who commits “hate crimes”—and for the way it was solved: via social media. After the police released street-side surveillance video showing a group of young people walking away from the crime scene, citizens of the twitter universe began circulating the videos, matching faces to Facebook updates, and eventually pointing the police to suspects. Three arrests have since been made of two men and one woman, Philip Williams, Kevin Harrigan, and Kathryn Knott, each of whom has been charged with two counts of Aggravated Assault, two counts of Simple Assault, two counts of Recklessly Endangering Another Person, and one count of Criminal Conspiracy.

There is no doubt that this was a gay-bashing. The victims were singled because they were gay. And in the wake of the gay-bashing, some local politicians, state legislators, and LGBT activists are seeking to expand Pennsylvania’s hate crime statute to include sexual identity, gender identity, gender, and disability. Pennsylvania’s current hate crime law—the “ethnic intimidation and institutional vandalism act”—was passed in 1982. It mandates increased charges and penalties for crimes motivated by prejudice against the victim’s “race, color, religion, or national origin.” Thus, someone charged with a second-degree felony assault could have the charge—and penalty upon conviction—bumped up to a first-degree felony if ethnic or racial prejudice were alleged as a motive for the assault.

In 2002, Pennsylvania legislators expanded the hate crime statute to include sexual orientation, gender identity, gender, and disability; but the amended law was struck down by a state court on a technicality due to the way the original law was amended. (The amended language was attached to an agriculture bill.) Advocates of an expanded hate crime law have been trying to reintroduce and pass the amended law ever since, so far without success. The events of September 11, 2014 have given a renewed push to the campaign.

But what, exactly, would amending the state law concretely accomplish? Adding sexual orientation or sexual identity to the named categories would come too late to bump up the charges against Williams, Harrigan, and Knott or to enhance their sentences if they are convicted. And it would most certainly come too late to prevent the assault and serious injuries suffered by the two victims of September’s gay-bashing. Advocates of the change are trying to change the future. They argue that the prospect of enhanced penalties would prevent future such crimes, and that amending the law to include sexual identity and gender identity would also send an important message that crimes against LGBT people just for who they are do not just injure the victims, they “terrorize” an entire community, in the words of Pennsylvania State Representative Brian Sims, the openly gay legislator and long-time LGBT advocate working to amend Pennsylvania’s hate crime law. According to this line of thinking, adding sexual identity and gender identity to the existing hate crime law thus sends an important message that LGBT citizens are equally valued and equally protected. These are all emotionally powerful arguments, but do they hold up on closer analysis? The short answer is no. For a longer answer, listen to this segment from Radio Times:

Are LGBT Parents Bad for Children?tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00e54ed2b7aa883301a511d845ac970c2014-06-30T19:15:00-04:002014-07-01T12:32:36-04:00The authors of "You Can Tell Just By Looking": And 20 Other Myths about LGBT Life and People dispel the myth that LGBT parents are bad for children.Beacon Broadside

Michael Bronski, Ann Pellegrini, and Michael Amico came to Boston last fall to read from their new book, “You Can Tell Just by Looking”: And 20 Other Myths about LGBT Life and People. The book confronts some of the most common myths and misunderstandings about LGBT life and people. Myths, such as “All Religions Condemn Homosexuality” and “Transgender People Are Mentally Ill,” have been used to justify discrimination and oppression of LGBT people. Others, such as “Homosexuals Are Born That Way,” have been embraced by LGBT communities and their allies. In discussing and dispelling these myths—including gay-positive ones—the authors challenge readers to question their own beliefs and to grapple with the complexities of what it means to be queer in the broadest social, political, and cultural sense.

While waiting for the event to start, we had the opportunity to ask the authors about some key myths affecting the cultural landscape of LGBT people, and about LGBT parents in particular, a demographic sure to rise given marriage equality’s gaining acceptance. As the authors say in the book, “The often bitter debate that swirls around LGBT families cloaks the larger discussion: how do we all create a culture that nurtures all children, in all kinds of families, to grow into happy, loving, successful adults?...Until we create new ways for parents and children to live healthily together, neither will grow and thrive, especially as families.”

One argument against gay marriage and gay parenting is that LGBT parents are bad for children. Where does this claim come from, and is there any truth to it?

Michael Bronski: My immediate response is that all parents are bad for children and gay and lesbian parents shouldn’t be let off the hook. But that’s too flippant for the reality which is that there’s a long history of gay people being suspected of actually mistreating, abusing, sexually abusing children, and that is the overwhelming force behind this myth. Every single study shows that children function and are raised perfectly well under lesbian, gay, and same sex parents as any heterosexual parents. There’s no question—the American Psychological Association, sociologists, have all agreed upon this. So the myth is completely false. Having said that, I think it’s also important to say that children grow up in very specific families, and families that love their children produce very healthy, vibrant children. Dysfunctional families probably produce more dysfunctional children. The truth behind the myth is that all children are products of their families. Lesbians and gay men function under the burden of actually being suspect as parents, and that’s completely unfair and completely untrue. (Note: Watch a video of Michael Bronski’s answer above.)

Ann Pellegrini: The other piece of this is that, in all of these debates that happen about whether or not children raised by same sex parents are more likely to have host of problems—drug addictions, they won’t do well in school, they won’t thrive—no one actually talks to the children themselves who grew up in same sex families. I think that the children would have a very different story to tell. Of course, one of the poignant things that has happened in some of the debates around the country around same sex marriage is we have started to hear from some children, teenagers, speaking out on their parents’ behalf and their families’ behalf. And it’s a rare moment to get to hear what kids have to say, because this is a debate that talks about what’s best for kids but we prefer not to hear the actual voices of kids.

Michael Amico: There is an assumption that LGBT parents might make their kids gay or lesbian because that’s what their sexuality is. But the fact of the matter is that most gay, lesbian and bisexual people actually come from straight parents.

MB: I would just add that there are a wealth of studies that show that there is damage done to children from gay and lesbian parents. These are studies that are predicated on looking for harm done to the children. They are not objective studies. They actually do not do these studies looking at heterosexual parents. So the methodology that in fact the Christian right or the conservative groups use is completely biased.

AP: If you look for evidence that children are struggling in life, you’ll find it. Because it’s hard being a child.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS:

Michael Bronski has been involved in gay liberation as a political organizer, writer, and editor for four decades. He is the author of several award-winning books, including A Queer History of the United States, and most recently coauthored “You Can Tell Just by Looking”: And 20 Other Myths about LGBT Life and People. He is currently Professor of the Practice in Activism and Media in the Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Ann Pellegrini is professor of performance studies and religious studies at New York University, where she also directs NYU's Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality. She has written extensively about religion, sexuality, and US public life. Her publications include Performance Anxieties and the coauthored book Love the Sin.

Michael Amico is a PhD candidate in American studies at Yale University, and is writing a history of the love between two men in the Civil War. He has written for LGBT youth publications, such as Young Gay America, and provided political analysis for the Boston Phoenix and other venues.

Massachusetts: An Illustrious History of Progressiveness, Justice, and Pridetag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00e54ed2b7aa883301a511c89d1d970c2014-06-06T18:30:00-04:002014-06-06T18:30:00-04:00A Massachusetts resident celebrates the state's progressive leadership, how it became a beacon of hope for the marriage equality movement, and, while she's at it, dispels some LGBT myths with Michael Bronski, Ann Pellegrini, and Michael Amico, authors of “You Can Tell Just By Looking”: And 20 Other Myths About LGBT Life and People.Beacon Broadside

We in Massachusetts have had an illustrious history of progressiveness, justice, and pride. It was the first individual state to write a constitution declaring universal rights; Horace Mann led education reform here; we have the Kennedys and the Red Sox and Emily Dickinson. And we were the first state, ten years ago last month, to legalize same-sex marriage.

This is the real reason I am proud to be from Massachusetts. Same-sex marriage is now legal in sixteen countries and nineteen US states, including all of New England. National support for marriage equality is at 59%, an all-time high. And we helped elect a president who vocally endorses same-sex marriage. It might be bold to say, but from the looks of it, our progressiveness and acceptance are making international rounds.

But every major step we as a country have made toward equality has been mired in controversy. In April, a Latta, South Carolina police chief was fired based on her sexual orientation; a former Library of Congress employee sued the organization for sex discrimination; Arkansas has stalled its allowance of same-sex marriages; and just recently social media blew up in response to the NFL draft of Michael Sam, and the subsequent kiss heard ’round the world. In ten years, we’ve made quite a bit of progress, but we still have a long way to go.

Many arguments raised by opponents of same-sex marriage arise from misunderstandings of LGBT culture, and myths that arise as a result of these misunderstandings. Michael Bronski, Ann Pellegrini, and Michael Amico have commented extensively on mythmaking at the expense of the LGBT community in their book “You Can Tell Just By Looking”: And 20 Other Myths About LGBT Life and People. These myths—claiming, for instance, that LGBT parents are bad for children, or that existing antidiscrimination laws in the United States protect LGBT people, or the idea that same-sex marriage can harm “traditional” marriage—all contribute to the negative public response of not only same-sex marriage, but of the LGBT community in general. The authors spoke with us in more detail about these issues at an event for their book last fall.

Addressing the fear that LGBT parents somehow raise abnormal children, Pellgrini praised those children who have come forward and spoken on behalf of their LGBT parents. Despite there being a “debate” about what’s best for these children, many opponents have not been willing to hear about the normal upbringing the children have had. Bronski added that “children are products of their families” and, LGBT or not, if parents are dysfunctional, their kids will likely be dysfunctional too. The idea that LGBT parents are somehow less fit for parenthood makes little sense.

The question of antidiscrimination laws, and the protections they do or don’t provide, is more complex. To get technical, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 offers protections under Title VII for what is called “sex” discrimination. In the Library of Congress case, “sex” discrimination is being used as a sort of umbrella term for broader protections, including anti-gay discrimination. On the other hand, many activists have been vocal about pushing The Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) through Congress, which would specifically prohibit workplace discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation. But do we need a separate law for LGBT workplace discrimination if the Civil Rights Act already covers it?

The book puts it simply: “Despite many Americans believing in a basic precept of equality…LGBT people are, largely, not protected in the workplace.” The patchwork of existing state and local LGBT antidiscrimination laws is far from inclusive, and the interpretation that the Civil Rights Act also covers LGBT discrimination is simply that, a recent interpretation, and not invulnerable to further legal challenge. While ENDA wouldn’t resolve all debates of fairness, it would at least, according to the authors, “make fairness the law of the land.”

Not just a law, but a principle this country was founded on.

Massachusetts has been a beacon of hope for the marriage equality movement. At the risk of sounding too idealistic, I believe Massachusetts has created a new Freedom Trail. One that I hope leads throughout the rest of the country, picking up supporters along the way with a rallying cry for peace and equality.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Robin Beaudoin is a writer, a bookseller, and a proud resident of the state of Massachusetts. Her favorite word is genuflect.